


fish boy

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Fantasy, Fluff, M/M, MerMay, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 19:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19046872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: Bellamy Blake is bored out of his mind at a king penguin research base on Arkadia Isle, and yearns for a little adventure. An entangled summer romance with a particularly difficult mermaid, however, might just be more than what he bargained for.





	fish boy

**Author's Note:**

> this is extremely self-indulgent and cutesy (except for the parts that are incredibly not cutesy) and posted literally twenty minutes after mermay ended because i am an idiot. and for these reasons this story is very dear to me. please enjoy
> 
> song rec for this fic: the entire slenderbodies discography but particularly "little islands" and "anemone", but i suggest a good lo-fi playlist for reading :)

 

There was an island where parents abandoned their children during the winter and puked into their mouths during the summer. They stole from and cheated on and sabotaged each other. They shat and vomited and screamed.

Penguins were disgusting, and Bellamy Blake was sick of Arkadia Isle.

_Expedition 100._ They were shipped off to a bare necessities research camp on a shitty subantarctic island that housed the shittiest colony of the shittiest birds on Earth. The team’s scientists were heroically braving the cold isolation to study the effects of climate change on king penguin populations, and Bellamy was keeping the floors lickable.

Bellamy Blake was sick of Arkadia Isle. He was sick of the base camp; he was sick of eating slop; he was sick of Wells Jaha and Clarke Griffin; he was sick of rocks and ice and cold and the fucking _penguins._

He really didn’t want to be there even before he realized how much he hated the island. But his little sister, Octavia, was the first to sign up for the expedition and the first off the ship, and he detested the idea of leaving her to traipse around the world’s most dangerous climates without his watchful eye upon her. She was all he had in the world. All that he wanted, anyway. He could do without a lot of what he did have.

He made eye contact with himself in the murky water of his mop bucket and made a funny face that wiggled back at him until he slapped the mop into it and made it disappear. Three weeks down, ten more to go. Then he could leave this freezer-burned hellhole. The first thing he’d do? Have some decent sushi.

His watch buzzed to signal that his heroic and brave janitorial duties were complete for the day, so he made his way across camp to the dorms, shucked off his slick blue uniform and changed into his unauthorized afternoon trip clothes. The big parka and boots went on by the building’s doorway, or else he’d start sweating, and there just wasn’t enough hot water, or cold water, or anything there to justify taking more showers than absolutely necessary.

He slipped out quietly so no one could miraculously find the time in their busy schedule to lecture him about poking at the fauna, and treaded over black, smooth stone by the rushing sea shore. There was never anything interesting other than minnows at the rock pools— the water there was damn near too cold to be a home to anything at all— but sometimes he saw scallops or sea spiders or sponges, and if he was lucky, a starfish.

So one would be surprised to see a boy there, in the water and reaching into one of the pools. Bellamy slipped on a rock as he approached and checked to see that his boots were tied, and when he looked up again the boy was gone.

It didn’t occur to him until later that night when he was smiling dully over a lopsided cake while the crew members sang at him that the seawater there was cold; far too cold for swimming. He must have imagined the boy. Of course he had, nothing interesting ever happened on Arkadia Isle.

Good God, he hated it when people sang, and “Happy Birthday” was by far the worst song of all. He blew out the number two candle and the number six candle too, and wished he could get the hell out of here.

 

〰〰

 

A week went by, and Bellamy flipped off an albatross that squawked at him from the shrubs lining the foot of a cliff’s rising edge. The rock pools started there and eventually curved underneath the narrow sliver of darkness that the cliff provided, further down the shore.

He crept around precarious patches of ice and folded his legs at the edge of the largest pool, which looked fuller and foggier that day, as if recently disturbed. Probably by the fish-boy who scrambled out of the rock pool and back into the freezing sea with a crab struggling in each pale hand, and a magnificent red tail following not far behind.

Bellamy sat and caught his breath for a few minutes, and then fell onto his back in the shifting pebbles and laughed. "This _fucking_ island.”

 

〰〰

 

Bellamy returned to the big rock pool at the same time every day. He was starting to agree with himself that he’d lost his mind out there, when one day the fish-boy’s head peeked out from behind the shallow wall of rocks, the pool separating them.

He only glared, and Bellamy wasn’t sure if the boy was considering him or communicating a threat. The boy left shortly thereafter, quickly, quietly, and well-practiced.

He came the next day, too, and seemed to decide that the pool was his, and not Bellamy’s, or at least public property. He shimmied over the rock wall and dove into the pool, resurfaced, and narrowed his eyes as he left, tucking a starfish into his mouth.

Bellamy waited to look grossed out until the boy was gone. It was the polite thing to do, even when dealing with sea monsters.

The boy came back every day, begrudgingly allowed Bellamy to watch him grab a to-go snack from the rock pool and vanish again. He left Bellamy’s monochrome dreams of ice and rocks splashed with red.

 

〰〰

 

A month of his life all but disappeared in a haze. He didn’t do a lot of active participation at canteen table discussions about penguin stool samples _before_ meeting the fish-boy, but now he spooned slop and dried this and canned that up to his mouth in faraway silence, waiting for his watch to ‘ _zzt’_ so he could sneak down to the big rock pool under the cliff.

One day, “Your brother’s kind of… not all there, is he?” asked Clarke, the head of the program’s daughter and best friend to the head of the whole damn organization’s son, the self-proclaimed boss of them all and Bellamy especially, it seemed like.

Octavia pulled her lip in, considering and watching him with poorly-hidden concern. “I guess there’s just something interesting swimming around in that big head of his, lately.”

It was colder than usual the day Bellamy slipped out of the camp and trekked down to the rocky shore. His parka’s zipper was broken, too. He was shivering when the tell-tale sparkle of a red tail under white sun flicked out of the water and then shimmied over the ridge and splashed, hushed, into the still pool.

The boy was fast and sharp, usually, but took longer hunting that day and only came up with seaweed, which Bellamy had noticed he didn’t like very much. He didn’t slither out of the pool so soon that time, and lounged against the ridge of it with an arm thrown up on the rocks, nibbling unhappily on slimy weeds. 

His nut-brown hair laid wet against the sides of his head, and besides the crimson scales creeping up from his gills to his jawline, his face was no stranger than the average human boy’s. His nose was pointed, his sea foam eyes were big and round, and his teeth were sharp. Bellamy was admiring him so closely that he almost missed it when: “Cold,” the boy said hoarsely, “Go.”

_English!_ He spoke _English!_

“You’re cold?” Bellamy asked, and pointed at the boy, who snapped a strip of seaweed in half with a little jerk of his head. Bellamy wondered what he could do to a human. The boy pointed back at Bellamy.

“Me, cold?” Bellamy asked, and pointed at himself, too. Fish Boy merely looked at him like he was stupid, finished his seaweed, and dove back into the sea.

Yes, Bellamy cold, he agreed, and trudged back to camp hugging himself. Stupid weather. They could’ve stayed longer. If Fish Boy wanted to.

 

〰〰

 

Bellamy talked a lot, the next day. Perhaps too much.

“—They’re nasty, they smell like shit. Do you ever eat penguins?” He slung a flat pebble out over the ocean and it only skipped once before a wave pulled it under.

Fish Boy cocked his head and raised a brow. Bellamy sighed, hoping he wouldn’t make a habit of this, and stood up to half-heartedly flap his arms against his sides and waddle in a small circle. “Pen-guin.”

The boy trilled with his mouth closed, and Bellamy hated knowing that he was being laughed at. “No,” Fish Jerk answered, ducking his head and smiling at the water. Bellamy smiled at him often enough, and wondered if the creature was mimicking him, trying to be friendly. Bellamy supposed he ought to learn how to trill and click and enjoy sea urchins. The boy’s smile was awkward and strained… and rather cute.

“What’s your name?” he asked, stretching out on his belly on the stones and propping his chin up on his hands. Noticing this, Fish Boy, for the first time, moved off the ridge and came a bit closer. He didn’t answer, so Bellamy pointed at himself. “I’m Bellamy.”

“Bellamy,” Fish Boy said comprehendingly, and then pointed at himself and made an insane, unintelligible cacophony of clicks, gurgles, and squeaks. Sure, Bellamy thought, no problem.

They studied each other for a moment, and then the humanoid turned hesitantly away toward the ridge. The orange sun made it so that the scales brushed sparingly along the boy’s shoulders gleamed like tiny flames.

“Again, Bellamy,” he said over his shoulder, and gave a small, jerky wave. Bellamy did this all the time when he left, of course, but it looked just adorable when Fish Boy tried it out. Bellamy returned the gesture, and felt lonely all over again as soon as Screechclick Whistlechoke disappeared into the depths.

Back in his dorm, he wrapped himself in a blanket and sat at his desk, touching and inspecting all of his things as if seeing them for the first time, as if he’d just come out of the ocean and didn’t know what a sardine tin was. 

Bellamy rolled the short pencils in the tin under his finger, and flipped the red, vintage tin on its side to examine it. There was a mermaid whose green tail wasn’t nearly as magical as Fish Boy’s printed on it, dangling a little fish over her open mouth. “Murphy’s Sardines” it read, in tilting yellow font. 

Bellamy dumped the pencils out onto his desk and tucked the tin into his parka pocket, and smashed his smile into the pillow after he turned his light out. 

The prospect of getting out of bed in the morning didn’t sound quite so dreadful, anymore.

 

〰〰

Bellamy mopped and scrubbed and wiped and dusted and swept and polished with renewed vigor, and was sure to tug on a toboggan and scarf before he ambled down to the beach. It was snowing today, and there was a thin film of ice over the tide pools. 

Fish Boy arrived at the same time Bellamy did and stared at the freezing pool, wanting to come closer. He pulled himself onto the rocks and slammed his fist through the ice, and the frost over most of the pool shattered into tiny triangles. He looked satisfied and climbed inside, fished out a sea star and sucked on it like a popsicle. Lately, being acquainted with a mythological creature had Bellamy considering himself and wondering if he was reacting properly to the sheer strangeness of it all. Mostly, he just thought the creature was fun. Why dwell for long on the weird?

He sat cross-legged at the edge of the pool and examined Fish Boy’s long tail, curled under him and flicking shards of floating ice away from his human-like skin on occasion. Bellamy knew from living in a nerd camp that Antarctic fish naturally have anti-freezing properties in their blood, but might carry ice crystals around in their veins for their entire lives. He wondered if the ice crystals slowed Fish Boy down. It didn’t seem like it.

Fish Boy turned onto his back as a skua toddled up to the pool, and slammed his tail with a great crash down on the rocks next to the bird. It squawked and took to the air in a panic, and Fish Boy rolled his eyes as he slid his tail back into the water.

“Nasty,” he complained, and Bellamy laughed much louder than he’d planned to. Fish Boy raised his thick brows at the strange sound, and cocked his head. Bellamy noticed his jagged, scaly ears flicking as he listened. Sometimes he almost forgot that Fish Boy wasn’t a boy at all.

“Oh,” he remembered, and dug the sardine tin out from his coat pocket. “Come look,” he said, beckoning Fish Boy over, and placed it on the rocks in front of him.

Fish Boy came closer than he ever had before, picked up the tin and turned it over and over in his hands, ran pruny fingers over the embossed logo. He squinted and drew very near to the tin to inspect the picture, and Bellamy wondered if his kind had poorer eyesight than humans. That was alright, he had a battering ram for a tail. He didn’t need 20/20 vision.

“Me,” he decided, and showed Bellamy the mermaid, shoving the tin much too close to his face.

Bellamy snickered and gently guided Fish Boy’s hand clutching the tin down to the ground between them again. He traced the first word with his finger. “Murphy,” he said, and pointed at Fish Boy. Fish Boy blinked, released the tin, and moved away to the other rock wall to mouth on the poor sea star again.

“Good enough,” he declared, and Bellamy, smiling satisfactorily, had no idea where he got some of his phrases.

The gray ocean crept forward and peeled away under the white sky a few times, and eventually the creature took the starfish from between his teeth to speak. Never wanting to stay for too long, he hunched over the rocks, turned, and said, “Come look you again, Bellamy.”

“See you again, too, Murphy,” the human answered, and watched the dreary sea rock against the shore and cliffside long after the red streak had zipped away under a wave, quiet as a skipping stone.

When Bellamy returned to the base, Wells was standing at the outskirts of the camp on his phone, bundled up warm. The phone call must have been important because Wells didn’t say a word to Bellamy about his little trip. He only watched him with narrowed eyes, probably suspecting the snow-speckled janitor of going out to murder penguins every afternoon.

Evenings spent with Murphy had made hating everyone else at camp a little bit easier, for better or worse, now that Bellamy had someone to compare them to.

 

〰〰

 

He didn’t bother doing any research on merpeople. It felt like an invasion of privacy, for one, and for two: what else did he need to know? 

Murphy had gills and scales and a powerful tail that he wasn’t afraid to use. He had sharp teeth for tearing into fish and crustaceans, and large, open ears for hearing everything and anything, which made up for his weak eyesight. He was fast, learned quickly, and he hated seaweed. Bellamy knew more than enough. There was no need to get greedy.

He tried to keep this in mind when Murphy showed up at the rendezvous pool late one afternoon, late enough that the sun was setting. The orange gleam of it washed over Murphy’s bruised, protruding ribs, and over the three deep cuts slashed across the left side of his face.

“You’re hurt,” Bellamy said, kneeling at the edge of the pool. Murphy didn’t hunt or eat, only folded his arms over the rocks and rested the unscathed half of his face on them. He was shaking, but his bored, empty expression betrayed nothing. Bellamy chewed his lip, and then settled his hand on Murphy’s wet hair.

Murphy jerked a little and opened his eyes for a moment, surprised, but closed them again and accepted the touch for what it was. Safe.

They didn’t speak that afternoon, and Bellamy petted the creature’s hair and watched the sandstone sun go down, felt the temperature drop in the dark until they were both trembling. 

“I have to go,” Bellamy whispered, and Murphy nodded against his drying arms. Bellamy noticed, under the moonlight, his glittering, webbed fingers curling in, the shrinking of the small fins along the undersides of his forearms, and the slow vanishing of the red scales around them. 

“See you again,” he murmured, tearing himself away slow like a bandage stuck to skin. Murphy didn’t say goodbye, and when Bellamy looked over his shoulder Murphy was still in the pool, resting his shredded face on the rocks.

The island’s ocean was just starting to gain Bellamy’s favor as something beautiful, rather than a home to the mysterious and strange and cruel. That night he’d wondered if he shouldn’t reconsider that.

Wells was watching him from the computer lab window when he crept back into camp, and Bellamy gave a faux-friendly wave. “Caught you staring, stalker,” it said. The scientist crossed his arms and came to intercept the janitor in front of the canteen’s double doors.

Bellamy tried to strut around him, undeterred, and grunted when Wells sidestepped and blocked him. “You want me to answer a riddle or something?”

“You’re not authorized to enter the research area. That beach is taped off, so don’t play stupid. What are you doing down there?”

Bellamy attempted to juke Wells and almost managed to get a hand on one of the door’s push-bars before he was thwarted again by Wells’ light feet and broad chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bellamy huffed. “Now, your highness, please oh please will you grant me entry so that I may humbly get some goddamn dinner?”

“They stopped cooking hours ago, but I figure you were too busy disturbing the research subjects’ habitat to keep track of time. Is that right?”

Bellamy matched Wells’ hard stare for a moment, and turned on his heel to headtoward the dormitories. “I’m not interested in your stupid penguins.” Wells did not follow, but Bellamy had an inkling that that wouldn’t be the end of it.

In his dorm, he microwaved some instant noodles and watched _The Little Mermaid_ on his laptop until the very end. He wiped his fork clean and tried to brush his curls with it in the foggy mirror over his desk, but felt kind of gross about it and put the silverware away. He was a human, after all, and humans knew what things were and how to use them right and kept it at that.

His tail would probably be blue, he imagined, and he’d probably hang around the Philippines, where the water was warm, and where he and Murphy could get some sun on their skin and some meat on their bones and talk as long as they’d like, out on a skerry in the middle of the sea.

 

〰〰

 

Bellamy hiked to the top of the cliff hanging over the beach and breathed in the crisp, cold island air, opening his arms wide as if drawing the ocean in like he was the moon. He tugged the tide in and watched with a grin as he spotted the tell-tale krill cloud of Murphy’s tail pacing just under the surface, waiting for Bellamy.

He made his way down to the rock pool and dumped a tupperware container out on the rocks, a buffet of human trinkets for Murphy to examine. He’d been doing this for a week now, and even the merman sometimes brought Bellamy sea glass or soda rings or a dead creature of some kind. The third offering was alive, a small squid wriggling around in his hand. 

Murphy seemed to think it was fascinating and Bellamy didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so he made lots of interested faces, and now Murphy wouldn’t stop bringing him squids.

That day, Murphy didn’t care for the fork, and screwed his face up at the taste of canned lemonade. The Rubix cube occupied him for a little while, but he tired of it and turned his attention to massacring a small group of tiny white crabs.

“Day is good?” Murphy chatted benignly while he ate, offering some to Bellamy, who gratefully declined.

“Same old, same old,” Bellamy sighed. “Prince Jaha’s still giving me a hard time, the nosey bastard.”  


Murphy fished around in his mouth for some part of the crab that he didn’t actually want, and when his mouth was free of fingers he said, “I kill him.”

The boy usually offered to give the objects of Bellamy’s complaints a simple whack with his tail or a tipping over of their boats, but seemed to be fed up and snappy today, too. Bellamy noticed faint, fingerprint bruises on Murphy’s arms, and a deep bite mark on his shoulder.

“The others, like you,” Bellamy began tentatively. “Are they hurting you?”

Murphy sank into the water to hide his wounds, and scratched absently at his gills. 

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

The sea creature looked vulnerable for a moment, before he rolled his eyes and turned his back on Bellamy, exposing the small, torn fin that ran along his spine. “I know,” he said, and flicked his tail, splashing freezing water over his head and onto Bellamy’s thick coat and red-nosed face.

“Hey!” Bellamy shouted. “I was being _nice.”_

Murphy trilled, rolling his eyes again (a human gesture that he seemed to have taken a real liking to) and came close to stretch out of the water and pat Bellamy’s head. “I know,” he repeated. “Human always want to learn.”

  Bellamy didn't have time to ponder that, seeing as Murphy was dripping seawater all over him and had lowered his hand to trace the shell of Bellamy’s round ear. Bellamy closed his eyes and let Murphy explore him. 

The boy touched the skin that stretched low between Bellamy’s fingers, held his wrist and gingerly pushed up his sleeve to skim a curious touch over his freckled, finless forearm. It was all sweet and dreamlike, until Murphy jammed a finger in Bellamy’s mouth and pulled his lips up from his gums, traced his smooth teeth. He looked unimpressed, and leaned away to sound a short little whistle.

“Excuse you,” Bellamy said around his fingers and drew away, smacking his lips apart from the strange taste of saltwater and raw crab. “I don’t make fun of _your_ teeth.”

Murphy slung his tail over the rocks leading out to the sea and pulled himself onto the short stretch of land. “Nothing bad of my teeth,” he proclaimed, and ended the argument altogether as he slipped into the ocean. He paused, then, one hand on the ridge and looking thoughtful.

“We hate Wells,” Murphy stated, and turned against the grapefruit sky settling against the sea to look back at Bellamy. “You hate me?”

Bellamy didn’t remember making any indication of hating Murphy. “Are you… asking how I feel about you?”

Murphy shrugged. If he could’ve asked it that way, he probably would have.

“I don’t hate you. I like you, Murphy. We’re friends.”

“Friends,” Murphy repeated.

“Friends are people who spend time together just for fun, and make each other happy.” He gave a small, stupid smile. Hap-py.

Murphy’s spiked ears swiveled and flared, and Bellamy had never seen them do that before. The reflex made him look pleased, and it looked more at home on him than his awkward, strained smile. “Okay,” he agreed. “See you to spend time together again, Bellamy.”

That one was a mouthful and Bellamy snickered at it, but it seemed important to Murphy to be continuously perfecting their goodbyes. He wondered how long it would take to come up with the perfect one. He wondered if they’d have enough time together to come up with it.

“See you to spend time together again,” Bellamy bade. He gathered his things and turned toward the hill. “Goodbye, Murphy.”

At the top of the dry, flaxen slope he looked over his shoulder and caught a face peeking out from the murk. Murphy turned over and gave a wide red wave with his tail before he bowed under the water again, magnificent one moment and gone the next, indiscernible from the mirage of a bored and lonely man, stranded on a snowy island in the Atlantic. A man with only fish and birds and humans so smart they hardly counted as humans for company.

Bellamy’s grin wrinkled the ends of his eyes, and he was careful to tuck the piece of blue sea glass that Murphy had brought him into his plastic container, and the container under his coat, before Wells descended upon him for another one of their lovely interrogation sessions.

But Wells didn’t show, and at the dinner table he overheard from Monty and Clarke that he’d gone with one of the younger scientists, Jasper, to retrieve the body of a tagged penguin that was stranded on a sea stack just a few miles out for a postmortem examination. That would keep Wells off of his back for a few days, seeing as he’d be hard at work in the pathology lab all day and too tired to be a parasite to Bellamy in the evening. He grinned into his stew. Sometimes good people _did_ win.

In his dorm that night, he added the smooth pebble of cobalt sea glass to the jar on his desk and held it up to the fluorescent light. The glass shimmered like moonlight on the waves, like fish scales under a cold, blank sun. Murphy had almost managed to make Bellamy believe color existed on Arkadia Isle.

Almost.

 

〰〰

 

Wells Jaha was gone.

He was on the boat, and then he wasn’t. Jasper dove in after him, but he was just… gone.

Jasper, frostbitten, was taken on the shuttle to the mainland hospital in his blue blistered skin to be treated and file a police report, Clarke wasn’t coming out of her dorm, and Bellamy punched a hole through his wall into Wells’ empty room shortly before tearing across the camp like a thunderstorm.

It was his fault. It was his fault and it was still his fault and wouldn’t stop being his fault when he stormed into the biology lab and told the scientists that there was a creature down by the rock pools. A creature that was fast and strong and silent, enough to make Wells disappear without a trace. That the creature had told Bellamy he would kill him.

He couldn’t risk having the thing pluck every person Bellamy ever complained about out of their boats and out of existence. Murphy wasn’t the Little Mermaid. He was an animal. He- _it_ was dangerous. Bellamy had been stupid.

Nature was dark and disgusting and cruel.

Bellamy had been stupid to forget that.

 

〰〰

 

   They spent the following day preparing their gear, and at sundown Bellamy and three of the scientists started down the hill. They hid in the shrubbery and urged him on alone.

   Bellamy pulled his knees to his chest at the rock pool underneath the cliff, the cold wind forcing stinging tears from his eyes.

“Hey,” it called as it arrived, and clicked a greeting in its own language as it shimmied over black stone and into the pool. “Come look.” 

It was a baby squid, opaque and dotted with black spots, lying trusting in the merman’s palm. It was being gentle with the young creature, and released it in the pool once Bellamy turned his stare back out upon the pewter sea. “I take him back to ocean when we say goodbye. He play here.” The creature watched the squid fondly as it bumped against the rocky walls of the pool, looking for holes. “Stupid, like friend Bellamy.” It trilled quietly at its own teasing, a tiny sound, purring, almost.

A tear escaped from him, and still Bellamy did not look at the animal, even when it turned up its big blue-green eyes and cocked its head curiously at what it saw.

“I splash you,” it guessed, knitting its brows and holding onto the rocks at Bellamy’s side, tracing the teardrop with his gaze as it rolled down to the human’s chin. “Sorry.”

Bellamy had never apologized to the creature before. There was never any need until today. There were so many words that Bellamy didn’t know how it had gotten its hands on. He was glad it knew this one.

“I’m sorry, too,” Bellamy whispered, and its ears flattened against its head too late as Clarke blew the dart. It plunged into the humanoid’s neck, and Bellamy closed his eyes as the net flew over the pools and dragged the creature back into the shallow water from where it had scrambled onto the rocks and tried to make it back out to sea.

The animal fought the net that had folded it in on itself, produced distressed clicks and whines and screeches that could have pierced a better human’s eardrums. No one stopped, nothing came. 

It quickly gave up calling for help and gnawed fruitlessly on the strong material with razor blade teeth, writhed and beat its tail against the ground. It tried to slip its hands through the small diamond spaces to get purchase on the rock and heave itself out of the pool, but they couldn’t fit through. When all of its other efforts had failed, the creature looked to Bellamy, who had moved a safe distance away from the pools and stood with the other humans.

“Please, Bellamy,” it begged quietly, gills flaring fast. “Hurts.”

“You killed Wells,” Bellamy explained, and his tears spilled over.

“No,” the animal pleaded, “No, no, _no!”_

It took twenty minutes for the tranquilizer to do its job. The waiting seemed endless, and the creature didn’t stop fighting until its eyes fluttered closed and it sank down in the water, head lolling forward. The little squid darted around its prone body, and Bellamy could imagine which captor it must have decided was more dangerous.

A driver brought a trailer down the hill path with a wide tank of saltwater strapped down to it, and they propped the unconscious creature gills-deep in the tank, leaving its mouth and nose above the surface. Monty sat by its side, diligently keeping it in the safest position. Clarke and Bellamy sat in the truck’s backseat in mournful silence until they returned to the camp.

The animal was transferred from the tank into a larger, shatter-proof aquarium that had been emptied of any other specimens, hooked up to water quality monitors and all sorts of tubes in a backroom of the biology laboratory. They filled the tank halfway and drilled holes in the makeshift steel lid, which was locked down tight a foot above the creature’s head. 

It was gray and cold in the room, and Bellamy was sure to leave before they started doing any tests or before they asked him any questions, before that thing opened its eyes and realized all over again that it had been betrayed.

It was snowing when he left the laboratory, so he stood under the white sky and let the colorless flurries soak into his thick clothes and his cold skin.

Bellamy had no choice. He had to do it. His selfishness, his loneliness, his world-weariness; they’d put real lives in danger, and this was the only way to keep Murphy— the _sea monster_ from hurting anyone else on his behalf. This was the only way, and he had to do it. He had to. He had to. He had to.

 

〰〰

 

A week went by, and Bellamy hadn’t set foot in the laboratory. The scientists had decided to get as much information as they could to make public, running test after test after test on the new creature in their care, before a government operation stepped in and swept the whole thing under the rug. They already had enough attention on them what with the police interrogating Jasper and the other scientists about Wells’ mysterious disappearance, and dredging the coast for his body, day by deteriorating day.

It seemed Finn and Octavia had evoked a bit of sympathy for the murderous humanoid from the others, so they fed it well and gave it the space and respect of the average human prisoner. The grapevine told that Clarke, however, utilized narcotic darts generously, took tissue samples more than strictly necessary, and according to Octavia, treated the humanoid like no more than a chunk of information to be cut into, probed, and forgotten. Bellamy couldn’t blame her, even if it made him feel sick to his stomach.

Down at the rock pool that night, the water rippled gently and often. It was crawling with creatures: crabs, small squids, urchins, sponges, shrimp, and brittle stars. The creature brought so many of them to show Bellamy and had forgotten them in the pool, and now they had made a tiny, bustling community of darting color in there, hiding in the rocks and the sand when the tide came in. It was no comfort at all to Bellamy, who had once wanted to see nothing more from the island apart from himself leaving it.

He trudged to the top of the hill crushing dry grass under his feet, and Clarke was there, stood hunched at the edge of the camp. Her nose was pink in the tangerine flicker of her lighter, as she tried and failed to hold a flame to her cigarette.

“Here,” muttered Bellamy, and lit it for her. He had never seen Clarke smoke before, and she didn’t offer him one.

“The lab is getting dusty and the floor’s sticky. You need to come in and clean. Back rooms, too.”

It was the worst thing she could have said to him then and Bellamy wanted to drop to his knees and beg. “Alright, Princess,” he said instead, and she sighed, handed him a cigarette and her lighter.

“You knew that thing was down there and you didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “Why?”

Bellamy took a long drag, long enough to make him stuff down a cough. “I was trying to protect it.”

“Well, you fucked up, Bellamy,” Clarke snapped, eyes staring emptily out over the faraway sea. “You fucked up and Wells paid for it. The thing in that lab isn’t an animal that mistook him for food. It knows who Wells was, it knows you hated him. The kill was deliberate.” Her fingers shook around her cigarette. “That thing is a monster, and you set it loose.”

“I know,” Bellamy whispered. “I’m sorry, Clarke. I’m so sorry.”

She left his worthless apology on the frozen ground between them and returned to the grieving base. Smoke swirled up and away from him long after she was gone, gray against a sky as black as coal. 

At night, Bellamy’s dreams were again no more than reels of old film.

 

〰〰

 

He could do this.

The following day, the central room of the biology lab was spotless; sparkling, even. He’d had his hand on the keypad to the first backroom for a few minutes past a second too long.

“You okay?” his sister asked, peeling off her rubber gloves as she came in from the pathology lab across the hall, the one with Wells’ dead penguin in it.

Bellamy nodded his false assent and slipped inside, facing the wall, back turned to the big saltwater aquarium. Maybe it was asleep. He dusted the lab equipment, the desk and its contents quickly, wiped down the door handle and the computer mouse. His backwards mopping moved along at a furious pace, until his shoulder blades hit something cold.

He swallowed and turned, against his better judgement, to the towering tank.

The creature sat at the bottom, eyes shut. Its skin was pallid, the insides of its elbows were bruised, and its long, ruby tail was contorted in a way that looked incredibly uncomfortable in order to fold up inside of the too-small tank. Its tail fins looked sharp, come to think of it. He wondered if it could hurt itself, if it moved wrong inside of the cramped container. This seemed like a cruel place to keep a livingthing. Hopefully someone had ordered a larger tank by then... 

   Bellamy shook his head. Why was he feeling sorry for the thing?

   Most animals that killed humans were put down right away. The sea creature was lucky it was special. Bellamy tried to convince himself that this one deserved to die more than any confused, violent animal did considering its intelligence, but couldn’t quite commit to the thought, looking as he was at the boyish features on its face, the stuttering rise and fall of its sunken chest.

Bellamy came closer, feeling pulled to do so against his will, and couldn’t take his eyes off of the creature. 

He didn’t feel guilty. He did what he had to do. He only wished the creature wouldn’t look so damn pitiful, humming a haunting song in its sleep. It was beautiful, the song, and as poisonous and enchanting as the terrible creature that sang it. The melody tasted like honey, felt like returning to a dream. 

Bellamy had shuffled across the floor without screwing his head on about it, and touched a palm to the glass. His eyes fell closed, and he blindly unlocked the tank to hear the music closer. It really was a beautiful song; a low hum that sounded like his mother’s chicken adobo, like making love in a hot canvas tent, like sun and warm water, like every note was strung together just for him.

It was so beautiful, and the spell only shattered the second he realized he couldn’t breathe.

His eyes snapped open. The tank’s metal lid was on the ground and the creature’s strong hands were wrapped around his throat, lifting him until only the toes of his boots brushed the floor. Its eyes were wild, and it shook Bellamy by the neck like he weighed nothing at all.

The creature’s stormy eyes bore into his as he choked, choked, choked. “I hate you,” it said, voice crackling like sideways thunder. “I _hate_ you.”

Bellamy scrabbled at the scarlet scales of its wrists to no avail. He tried to speak and nothing came out, just a blank gasp for air. Breathing hadn’t seemed of great importance when he’d been dancing in his mind to that hypnotic song. He wished now that he had kept such a thing in mind.

The creature tightened its powerful grip and flinched as a tear fell from its eye. “You feel what I feel,” it said, and Bellamy’s eyes were too busy darting around the clouds of black in his vision to see its venomous and miserable stare. “And then you die.”

He couldn’t beg for his life if he tried. His hands were slipping from the creature’s arms, his empty, crumpling airway fashioning him into a blind and limp cotton doll. The creature’s grip was faltering too, but tightened mercilessly when the backroom door creaked open, and it began hurrying to finish the job.

“Hey, I heard a loud bang. Everything okay in—? _Bellamy!”_

Octavia grabbed the mop lying forgotten on the floor and swung it fast and hard against the creature’s face. Free, Bellamy crumpled. 

He took in one last, desperate breath when his windpipe reopened, and then he was out cold on the floor, shipped off to another world wanting of color.

 

〰〰

 

Bellamy wasn’t allowed in the room with the creature anymore.

 

〰〰

 

He’d always hoped something worth telling stories about would happen to him, or else something that was so interesting and significant that he would have to carry the splendid secret of it for all his life.

After school every afternoon he used to rush up to his room, toss his backpack into the corner to be forgotten and tuck an action movie VCR tape into the TV slot. Secret missions and fast cars and men walking away from explosions played on the bubble screen for years at a time, and when his sister was old enough to enjoy real movies, he bought new tapes. Drama, adventure, fantasy, romance. Octavia took a liking to science-fiction and animal movies. Bellamy hated both. _Free Willy_ , 1993; the bane of his existence. 

When he was 19 and Octavia 12, their mother died. Dear old Dad had been long gone, a deadbeat or dead himself. Bellamy dropped out of college and came home for good, took up janitorial work at a local prison and saw to it that his sister had everything she could have wanted, at least of what he could give her. Then, he chased her around the globe, watched his sister work toward world-changing discoveries and mopped close behind her heels.

His dreams of grand adventure, of dying having lived a life that could not be replicated nor told in its entirety in any book, they became the notes of the dust-blanketed music box that each person grown old finds from a childhood long past.

He’d thought meeting the creature was his movie moment, the code in his epitaph. What a pitiful story that would be.

The rock pools no longer interested him. Very little did, save for the glint of gold from the water below the cliff one particular afternoon, a few days following the incident of Bellamy’s greatest act of unbelievable stupidity indeed. 

The waves were high that day, and slammed against the shore in a ceaseless fight. He inched closer to the edge, the wind whipping at him in warning as he neared. Bellamy curled his fingers around his toboggan and squinted against the high sun.

Sure enough, a broad, medallion yellow tail rose above the waves once more like a beacon before it was swept under again. The creature was slowly closing in on the rock pools, taking a jagged path.

He rushed down the knoll to the shore, stopping just a few yards short of the pools. They were dangerous, he reminded himself. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

The feminine creature held onto the edge of the pool, keeping away from Bellamy, too. Its chestnut hair clung to its neck and shoulders, and his eyes were drawn to its webbed hands, the left of which was missing three of its fingers. It, unlike the red-tailed creature, donned sharp, hooked nails that must have been incredibly lethal.

_“Where?”_ it demanded, and slapped its tail against the discontent surface in demonstration. Bellamy stared blankly, and it reached up to mime dragging three nails across its hazel eye. It was trying to find Mur— the other one.

“We have it. On land.”

It hissed, shoving itself away from the rocks. “Take here.”

Bellamy shook his head. “It killed a human; it’s too dangerous. _Your kind_ is dangerous. It stays with us.”

The canary-tailed creature glared at him, its glittering ears spiking high against its head. “Take here,” it hissed. “Too stupid to kill human.” With that, it pushed off of the rocks and submerged in the turbulent waters with a long, bowing arc of glimmering scales, and without a goodbye.

The red-tailed creature had hardly seemed stupid, and the other one’s few and furious words would haunt him for days and nights to come. 

That is, until Wells’ body was dredged up from the frigid sea.

 

〰〰

 

He was found close to the coast with a diving hose tangled around his ankles. 

Jasper was in the cockpit, of course he hadn’t heard him go over, hadn’t seen him. That would have been nice information to know before Bellamy had… done a lot of things.

He narrowly avoided knocking his chair over as he sprinted out of the canteen, neglecting to thank Monty for his information. The biology lab was a far enough run away to make him sweat around the collar. His jittering fingers failed to enter the keypad’s correct code once, twice, three times, blurting red lights and scolding him in beeps until he managed it. The backroom was cold as always as the heavy door creaked open.

There was a faint bruise across the— across _Murphy’s_ nose, and he looked ill, greater so than the last time Bellamy had seen him.

“Murphy,” he croaked. The creature’s eyes opened slowly, widened and narrowed, and he turned onto his other side in the water to ignore him.

“You were telling the truth. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.” There was no response, and Bellamy rushed forward to unlock the tank, hoping trust meant something to either of them this time. He slid the lid ajar with gritted teeth, muscles straining from the weight of it, and peered into the water.

His friend’s shape was distorted by ripples, created by the vibrations of Bellamy’s disturbance, but never really moved. Murphy looked like a pet store fish in a cup, sitting at the bottom and waiting for everything and nothing. “I’ll get you out of here,” he swore. “I promise.”

Murphy’s red-trimmed, barbed ears appeared to prickle in annoyance, and he poked his head out of the water to glare at Bellamy, who stumbled back with a hand against his bruised throat. In the fluorescent light the creature’s face was gaunt and white as bone. 

“Fuck off,” Murphy muttered, and sank back into the water.

If it were at any other time and place Bellamy might have laughed himself stupid with the understanding that the young biologists were teaching a miracle of science cuss words, but right then and there the harmlessness of it was far from funny. He would rather Murphy had attacked him again, but he only floated on his side with his arms curled around himself, staring at the wall, all the fight gone from him.

Bellamy had fucked up spectacularly, this time. But he’d make it right, he promised, sliding the lid back on and pressing his palm to Murphy’s tank. He’d make it right, and everything would be okay, and they would see color again.

 

〰〰

 

A list of plans that would, under any circumstances, not work:

Plan A: Convince the others that Murphy had to be returned to the sea without a word of the debacle to anyone else in the entire world ever.

Plan B: Try and move the tank down to shore after dusk on a stolen trailer hooked up to a stolen truck, when the laboratory and the garage would most certainly be locked.

Plan C: Toss the merman into a Radio Flyer wagon and _fucking_ book it.

Bellamy was at a loss, and every secret encounter with Murphy late in the evening to ask questions about his abilities or lack thereof to breathe on land or use magical merman powers to brainwash the other scientists seemed to end in either colorful swearing and thrashing or Murphy sliding the lid back onto the tank himself.

He was going to need some outside help, which is how he had found himself by the pools again, clutching a beaded necklace that Octavia had made for him as a very little child. She had strung a few of the lettered beads on in random order, spelling out E-M-O-R-I. To anyone else, it would have been garbage. To Bellamy, it was treasure, and he only hoped the mermaid with the golden tail would share the same sentiment about his offering.

She wasn’t ever lurking far, waiting for her… friend? She dashed close in a brilliant streak when Bellamy called out to her. _“Mermaid!”_

“Close face,” she snapped, treading water just out of his reach.

“I need your help,” he said, and kneeled to offer her the necklace, which was more of an apology than a bribe. She wanted Murphy free just as much as he did, it seemed. In that case there was no need to try and win her over with gifts, but Murphy seemed to love human objects, and he had an inkling that the mermaid might feel the same, and he could really use a friend right now. 

She eyed the necklace warily. “You take here?” she asked, miming a slash of three nails across her eye again. 

Bellamy nodded fervently. “Yes, I’ll bring him back, but I need you to help me figure out how to do it.” She snatched the necklace from his offering hand and ran a fingertip over the colorful beads.

“Human word.”

He peered closer at the white letter beads. “Emori,” he pronounced. “That’s what it says. Can I call you that?”

She raised her eyebrows and wound the necklace around her wrist. “Good enough.” Definitely a friend of Murphy’s, then. “I help.”

“Okay,” Bellamy agreed, sitting down on the rocks. “First, tell me: how long can you survive on land?”

She stared at him blankly, so he pointed at her, breathed exaggeratedly and patted his heart, and then touched the rocks.

She nodded her head and waved a hand at Bellamy’s entire being, and lingered on his legs in answer. “Legs?” he asked, uncomprehending, and she raised the end of her tail out of water and mimed splitting it into two halves. 

“Human,” she explained. “Some.”

Bellamy balked. “Murphy can… _transform?”_

“Mur-phy?”

Bellamy pointed quickly at the base on the top of the hill. “That’s what I call him.”

She clicked in understanding. _“_ We be human some, on land. It…” She let her head loll forward, closing her eyes.

“It’s tiring,” Bellamy decoded. “That makes sense. I think.”

He paused to stroke his chin with an elbow propped on his knee, staring hard at the mermaid, who waited patiently for him to gather his thoughts but with a stern face that suggested otherwise. “So it’s simple, then. He could transform, and then we could just run down here and he could go back into the water.”

_“No!”_ Emori cried. “Bad in water for Murphy.”

“What?” Being a human was bad, being a merman in a science lab was bad, and now being a merman in the ocean was bad, too? What the hell was Murphy supposed to do? Grow wings and become a bird? Shit and puke and scream? He’d probably like that, but nothing could ever be so easy.

She rolled the beads between her fingers, looking uneasy, and then creased with sadness. “Murphy be with bad human, be take, no kill human then. Our kind take he out of… home. Then he be with you. Our kind…” She charades an angry face. “Murphy no come in water here, he be kill.” Emori looked frustrated, and rubbed anxiously at her gills.

Murphy was with a bad human once and was taken, and he didn’t manage to kill them, so he was kicked out of his colony, or his school, or whatever. Now that he’d been taken by Bellamy and his people, too, his kind was angry with him, likely for putting their secret in jeopardy twice now, even during his banishment. He couldn’t come back to these waters alive. If he did, he’d be killed. He was a liability, being enchanted and betrayed by humans, time and time again.

The injuries, the malnourishment; Murphy was skirting the edges of the ocean without a colony, slowly starving to death and being abused back into corners. Slashed, beaten, scarred, and bitten by old friends and new enemies.

Bellamy was no better than the first humans that got their hands on the trusting red-tailed boy, and had kept him unjustly imprisoned for so long that he’d been discovered missing from nearby waters, even after Emori tried to warn him that he was wrong and Murphy needed to be returned at once.

He was no better, either, than the members of Murphy’s colony, who had left him to fight for his life after one mistake. The same mistake Bellamy had thought he’d made; trusting a barbaric species.

Righteous and undeserved anger welled up inside of him. He would get Murphy to a safer place. He would do better, _be_ better. He had to.

“I’ll take him somewhere else,” Bellamy promised fiercely. “He’ll… he’ll be okay.”

Emori nodded, tears welling up in her eyes, which she reacted to with alarm. Perhaps she had never been above water long enough to cry. She blinked her eyes clear and used them to implore Bellamy.

“He like…” she said, and then softly clapped both of her hands together above the water and waved once over her mouth. Clams. Then she sank unceremoniously to the seabed and slithered away beneath the waves, a sudden bereavement about her. Murphy wouldn’t be coming back to what might have been his only friend in the sea, and it was all Bellamy’s fault. 

Bellamy stood and looked out over the water after she left, wondering how much of Murphy’s blood made up the rolling waves.

“Yeah,” he said to the ocean. “I can bring him some clams.” It seemed like the least he could do.

 

〰〰

 

Most of the crew was leaving on the next sundown for a bar trivia tournament in town. 

“That’s when we’ll make our escape,” he said, and Murphy’s bored expression deepened.

Bellamy kept himself carefully confined to the desk chair, a mop and his cart nearby for excusatory purposes should anyone barge in to further experiment on the merman. The angry, fugitive merman convicted of two counts of treason against his colony and sentenced to death, who he had to sneak out of a research base and somehow transport to a new coastline.

“Our?” Murphy repeated, voice dull and quiet.

“Me and you.”

“Escape?”

“Leave here. Go back to the water.”

Murphy dropped his chin to his arms, which were crossed over the edge of the tank. “They kill me.”

“I’ll take you to other waters. Somewhere new.”

Murphy looked wary, still, and hid his mouth and nose behind his scale-peppered arms. “You lie.”

“Not this time.”

Murphy shook his head and stared hard at the door as if willing Bellamy to leave with his mind. “You lie, and I hate you.”

Bellamy came dangerously, bravely closer, and fished a mollusk from his coat pocket. Murphy snatched it away with both the urgency of a wild animal dependent on humans for food and a human child accepting a piece of candy, holding it close to his chest and widening his eyes at Bellamy. “I should’ve listened to you, Murphy. I hope you’ll forgive me one day. All I ask right now is that you trust me again, if only long enough to get you out of here.”

There was, as usual, no telling how many of Bellamy’s words had been understood, but the merman blinked slowly and sank down in the water, holding the white clam reverently in the palm of his hand.

He ate slowly under the still water as if thinking deeply, and emerged with the split halves of the mollusk held out in offering. Bellamy took them, and met the merman’s eyes with a comprehending nod. 

They had to erase all evidence of Bellamy’s illicit visit, of course, if they were to get Murphy properly the hell out of there.

 

〰〰

 

He’d dragged a pilfered dingy down to the rocky beach at sundown, and as night fell Bellamy watched the last group pull out of the base in a truck, rolling noisily along the gravel road toward town. It was a long drive, and left him plenty of time. The impossible plan was beginning to seem like child’s play.

He hurried to the laboratory and was careful to look out for stragglers, loners who had stayed behind and might be lurking around outside the dormitories, going about their own after-hours business, sneaking around with their own mythological creatures. He punched in the entry code to the backroom and shut the door quickly behind him, meeting Murphy’s wide eyes with a massive grin.

The merman held his palms to the glass as his tail swished excitedly behind him, and Bellamy’s giddiness grew as he shakily unlocked the tank from its lid. He took a deep breath as Murphy breached the surface, gulping in his own fresh air through his mouth. They stared at each other, unsure of how to proceed. Bellamy reached out and hesitated with his hands hovering over Murphy’s sides.

“Come on,” Murphy urged, bracing his hands on Bellamy’s shoulders, who shuddered at the touch and began to heft Murphy out of the tank. What a feat it was, as the merman must have been just under twice Bellamy’s weight once they’d dragged his more reasonable upper half over the tank’s slippery glass edge.

They collapsed on the floor together in a sopping heap, and Bellamy crossed his eyes as their noses nearly touched. “Sorry,” said Murphy, crossing his own. He then shifted his weight off of Bellamy and twisted to sit against the raised platform on which the tank sat.

Bellamy watched, propping himself up by his elbows in their puddle on the floor, as Murphy covered his mouth with his hands and stretched his tail out before him, shutting his eyes tight. It appeared that Murphy knew exactly what would happen when he chose to transform, and Bellamy rushed to fish a t-shirt from his backpack and stuff it between Murphy’s teeth, who let out a terrible, pained sound in the few moments between removing his hands from his mouth and biting down on the cloth.

It was all a very disturbing and confusing process to Bellamy, a simple human whose legs belonged to him a hundred percent of the time, but the tissue underneath Murphy’s hundreds of crimson scales appeared to absorb them, the scales which bit into the pale skin that slowly revealed itself. It must have felt like being cut in a hundred places. The smooth, flesh-colored tail then began to cave in along the middle, muscle fibers ripping and tearing apart, and weaving tightly together again into separate limbs. His large, spiked ears, assorted fins, and scattered scales did the same, paling over and smoothing out with the straining sounds of stretching skin.

Bellamy found himself wrapped around Murphy, eyes welling up with tears as the boy stared at his own painstakingly slow transformation with wild, red-rimmed eyes, but did not cry and willed it to resolve itself faster. His arms dangled despondently by his sides, not rejecting the comfort nor accepting it, and Bellamy could’ve almost been made to feel foolish for crying over pain that was not only another’s, but because of him, while the bearer himself withstood it. It just looked like it hurt so terribly, and he wasn’t sure what else he could have done save for traveling back in time so that they weren’t here on this floor together at all, but down by the rock pools, laughing and talking and doing nice, normal, human and merman things.

And just like that it was over, and Murphy wiggled his toes, and at that Bellamy let out a wet, relieved laugh, far more shaken than the merman.

Murphy removed the shirt from his mouth and leaned his back with a great, heaving sigh, and it was then that Bellamy realized two things of great importance. One: he wasn’t sure that Murphy would be able to walk, let alone run, and two: he was as naked as the day any human was born, and shivering, evidently having changed the very make-up of his blood. Not to mention that his transformed state certainly did not forgo any of the more delicate details of a human’s anatomy.

But they had time, so Bellamy spared a moment to help Murphy into the loose-fitting clothes he had packed, and found the beat of his heart quickening as he zipped a caramel, duck canvas coat up to Murphy’s chin and found a weird little smile there, Murphy’s sea glass eyes boring into Bellamy’s face. There was a tiny sparkle to them, tired as they were, and Bellamy noticed the barest hint of a red sparkle along his cheekbones, leftover from shiny scales after an unpracticed and difficult transformation.

“Warm, huh?” Bellamy said, ignoring his thudding heart and giving Murphy’s jacketed shoulder a little rub. 

“Warm?”

“Um.” Bellamy thought for a moment, and then reached out and took Murphy’s smooth hand, cupped it between his own, and breathed hot air onto it, rubbed a bit of warmth into it until it had dried.

Murphy was blushing when Bellamy flicked his eyes up to see if he understood, and that was new, too. “Warm,” he repeated, sounding a bit awkward, and drew his hand away. They sat that way for a moment, Murphy shyly rubbing at his own hand and Bellamy scratching the back of his neck, until he remembered the kind of rather urgent situation they were in.

“Okay,” he said, lacing up Murphy’s boots and looping his backpack over his shoulders. “Can you stand?”

Murphy used the platform to support his weight and drew himself up, standing fine on the significant muscle that seemed to have remained from his powerful tail.

Walking, however, was another story, and Murphy’s steps were halting as he tried different lengths of stride, first stepping hilariously far, and then taking baby steps after Bellamy corrected him, which was also wrong, to Murphy’s frustration. He walked alongside Bellamy as they paced across the room a few times, and as usual, the merman caught on fast even if his finalized execution looked a bit strange. 

Once Bellamy felt confident that Murphy could stay on his feet and match his pace, they hurried out into the lab and made for the door. Between Murphy’s rapidly scanning eyes roaming over all of the human things and his shiny new land legs, he tripped often and eventually became frustrated, grabbing Bellamy’s hand to keep pace and stay upright. His hand was smaller than Bellamy’s, soft and pruny from the water, and Bellamy pulled his lip into his mouth to stifle his grin. 

He tugged Murphy along down the corridor and out into the cold island air, and resisted the urge to break into a run toward the dingy. Murphy turned to him once fully outside and rejoiced by smiling silent and wide, seemingly unable to click in excitement but not grieving the loss, only adapting to it.

Bellamy, noticing his pink nose, pulled Murphy’s fleece-lined hood over his wet hair and let his knuckles linger by his cheeks. He suddenly felt like pulling the boy closer by his hood until their faces were very close, but did no such thing. They had time, and he would have to let it pass. Murphy’s joy was not to be mistaken for forgiveness. They had time.

However, as Murphy perked up and twisted to look back over his shoulder, it became evident that this was a false hope. Bellamy glanced at him and followed his gaze toward a dark figure rushing after them, and hurried his steps, tilting into a jog. Murphy made a distressed noise as he tried to keep up, and then became the one dragging Bellamy toward the shore as the figure called after them and stopped him in his tracks.

“Bell! Where are you going?!”

“Go back inside, O.”

Murphy tugged urgently at his hand and glanced back at the star-speckled water as if he were thinking of letting go and taking off on his own, but Bellamy held his ground and Murphy stayed.

“I stayed behind to make sure you were alright, imagine my surprise to see you sneaking off of the base again,” she commented as she caught up, breathing hard. “Who’s this?” She squinted through the dark, trying to make out Murphy’s features.

Bellamy exchanged a worried glance with Murphy, who seemed to steel himself, and gave his stiff little wave in greeting. “Hell-o.”

He was so goddamn cute, but now was not the time, and Bellamy had to refrain from clapping a hand over his mouth before he said anything else adorable and incriminating. “This is Murphy,” he said. “We met at the beach. He’s…“

Octavia looked down at the shadow of their intertwined hands and then at Bellamy’s face as he spoke, and quirked her lips into a smirk. “Okay, okay,” she interrupted. “Date night, I get it. I won’t tell Clarke you snuck off unauthorized. Just let me get a look at the only human on Earth weird enough to date my big brother,” she insisted teasingly, and before Bellamy could think to block him she raised a little flashlight and shone it at a downward angle on Murphy’s face, who hissed and leaned away from the bright light.

Octavia’s face tightened with confusion. “Wait a second—“

_“Run!”_ Bellamy shouted at Murphy, and broke their laced hands apart to race toward the dingy full speed. Murphy was lagging behind, though, and Octavia was gaining on him quickly. Just as Bellamy gritted his teeth and turned around to go back for the boy, he began to sing.

The notes were soft and at moments came quickly and slowed again, sounding akin to a piano melody. His voice was handsome and enchanting and almost estranged from its usual roughness, but it wasn’t the song Bellamy had heard all those days ago in the lab that drove him to unlock the tank. 

He made it to Murphy’s side with a clear head, or as clear as it could have been during such times so strange that he often wondered if he was dreaming, and watched, disturbed, as Octavia slowed to a walk and eventually stood still, pupils dilated wide and dark in the glow of Bellamy’s flashlight. 

Murphy turned toward the shore and took Bellamy’s hand again, and Octavia stood obediently in place as if frozen. He sang until they reached the dingy, tucked into the rocks where the long black shore met the island’s trees, sitting just outside of the moon’s dim spotlight. Then, he hummed until he had climbed inside of the small boat and Bellamy had pushed it off from the shore and crawled in himself, and carried on with the same tune until Bellamy had paddled them out of her sight, and even longer still.

When they had been apart from her for many minutes, Bellamy halted his rowing and watched Murphy sing, who had closed his eyes tightly as if wishing, as if knowing that another time being caught might be his last. 

He crouched in front of Murphy in the rocking boat rolling over small waves, the both of them bathed in moonlight. He held Murphy’s face in his hands until Murphy’s increasingly frantic humming became the silky and sure song of a siren again, and then shrunk down to nothing, to silence, to breathing.

“You’re safe,” Bellamy swore, searching his eyes as they opened. Then, noticing the empty look Murphy held on his face, “We escaped. You can rest now.” 

Murphy searched him back, and then dropped his head back against the bow of the boat and sighed, a big, warm breath puffing out from him like mist against the low stars on the horizon. His head slipped out of Bellamy’s hands and Bellamy drew away slowly, returning his attention to the oars and paddling further around the bend of the island.

He wasn’t sure where exactly he was headed, and intended to stop only when he felt that they had reached someplace new. Murphy crawled onto the bench across from Bellamy, balancing the dingy out nicely, and sat hunched over in a way that both suggested exhaustion and was simply Murphy’s posture.

Then he began to point at things.

“Boat,” answered Bellamy. “Oar. Boots. Coat. Trees. Shore. Sky. Stars.”

Murphy pointed up again very firmly when Bellamy repeated ‘stars’ a second time.

“Oh,” he said. “Moon.”

The siren hummed. “I like moon,” he murmured, staring up at it. “Moon take ocean in to shore, take food to me.” It was full and white and seemed unusually large that night. “ _More_ like,” he insisted, forceful. Bellamy understood. He _liked_ the Rubix cube, he _liked_ squids and clams. This was  _more._

Bellamy gazed at Murphy as Murphy gazed at the moon. “Love,” Bellamy suggested, and Murphy dragged his starry eyes down to the human’s face. “It’s bigger than like. You love the moon.”

Murphy nodded in agreement, eyes lingering on Bellamy before they floated back up to the night sky. Bellamy allowed himself a moment of awe, and then took to rowing again with a bit more urgency then. He liked the moon just as much as the next guy, but never before had he wished to be it.

The siren slept as they plundered on ‘round the island, an hour of rowing more than enough to bring soreness to Bellamy’s arms. He sat in the cubby hole between the dingy’s benches to take a break and woke a groggy, sluggish Murphy to the crinkle of the human unwrapping a granola bar. He passed another to Murphy, who laid the snack on the boat’s floor and dissected it like crab meat, picking out first the chocolate chips. He seemed to enjoy human food when in his human form, which was a relief. Bellamy hadn’t exactly had the time to catch any fish before his heist.

“Good?” Bellamy asked, and Murphy nodded, watching his food with intensity as if expecting Bellamy to steal it back.

The human watched him thoughtfully, chewing slow. “Will you be okay on your own?”

Murphy nodded again, knitting his brows. “Yes.”

“I could…” Bellamy began, but thought better of it with a sinking heart. There were so many things he wanted to say, but couldn’t. _I could come visit you, if you’d like. Maybe we could sit by the rock pools again. Wouldn’t that be nice? Do you forgive me? Will you ever? You don’t have to, but I wish you would. I don’t have many friends, especially none like you._

He wondered if this was how Murphy felt all the time, trying to speak in Bellamy’s language, struggling to put his thoughts in the right order, the right tense. Unable to find the right anything for what he was feeling. 

Or maybe everything was as simple as Murphy made it sound, and Bellamy was too human not to complicate it all. Maybe everything was just as the siren said: hate, like, love.

Bellamy brushed off his hands and clambered back onto the bench, taking ahold of the oars. He was stopped short upon his first stroke by cold hands around his wrists, their fingertips rough and scarred from grabbing rock and dealing with scales. “You are tired. I do it.”

So Bellamy showed him how to row, freckled hands guiding pale wrists in circles until Murphy got a feel for it and shrugged him off. “Sit,” he demanded. “I take us.”

And sit Bellamy did, watching over his shoulder for the periodic burst of white from a lighthouse in the far distance as they rowed on silently. When he turned himself around again, Murphy was watching him, eyes flashing against the reflection of moonlit waters.

“I see you. Hurt,” he said quietly, answering Bellamy’s questioning tilt of a brow. “On shore, you hurt me, but you are sorry now. I hurt you, and I am sorry. In sea, this means…” He paused in his rowing and held his palms up, facing each other at equal heights. Then, he wiped them in opposite directions. Equal standing. All that’s in the past is just that.

“Bygones.”

Murphy shrugged, having no idea what that meant, either. “Sure. Bygones.” Then he took up rowing again and shook his head, sighing. “Human trouble. Should just stop be with them.”

“You’re not the easiest case yourself,” Bellamy replied, and though it must have sounded like gibberish to Murphy, the boy granted Bellamy a playful roll of his eyes and carried on rowing.

It was strange, though. Murphy’s forgiveness had done little to lift the heavy night from Bellamy’s shoulders. They cut gingerly through the ocean in restless quiet, and as they crept up on the other side of the island’s narrower shore Bellamy felt an understanding slot into place. 

No matter how often he managed to sneak away and visit in the night, he would one day soon have to leave this island. He could only have been comforted by seeing Murphy every sundown they had left, lounging together on the rocks in companionable silence or talking so long that Murphy’s moon was high in the black by the time Bellamy could bear to leave. He wanted to learn all of the clicking curse words of Murphy’s language that he had yet to learn. He wanted to give so many more human trinkets and paper-wrapped sweets to the curious and cunning siren. He wanted to fill his jar of sea glass to the brim. He wanted… so much. It would only hurt to try and dash Murphy into what little remained of his cold summer on the miserable island. He wanted it all, and he couldn’t bear to have anything less.

“You couldn’t stay with me? After the summer’s over?” Bellamy asked as they slowed to a stop in front of the lighthouse, hopeless and bordering on rhetorical. _I know you couldn’t, but look at how hard it is for me to let you go. Don’t go on thinking I left you here for good and never came back because I wanted to or because it was easy. I hate leaving you more than I’ve hated anything, and I’ve hated so much._ “On land, with me and my sister. Couldn’t you stay?”

Murphy was stood in the center of the boat, removing his borrowed clothes. He froze with his fingers at the button of his pants, and turned to look at Bellamy in shock, and then sadness. He kneeled and took Bellamy’s face between his smooth hands as Bellamy had done to him earlier, maybe not grasping the intimate weight of such a gesture, or perhaps understanding it completely.

“I am sea.”

It didn’t matter that the ocean was eating Murphy alive. It wasn’t a place that he lived, it was a piece of his soul. He could give up the salty air and the rush of chasing prey and the powerful feeling of slicing through the water like a weapon no more willingly than the human could give up his own earthly pleasures; hiking tall green mountains, action movies and ramen noodles, reading on the subway. Bellamy would die in the water, and Murphy would lose himself on land, where it was safe and slow.

Bellamy nodded in understanding after a few moments spared for getting around to it, and Murphy didn’t unhand him, then, watching his eyes carefully with a reddening face. “In ocean,” he said lowly, sounding unusually fragile. “Love is…”

He placed a knee shakily on the bench and slid his cheek along Bellamy’s, and then placed a knee on the other side until he was sat in Bellamy’s lap, and dragged his face softly along the left half of Bellamy’s own.

Murphy held himself there, hiding his expression from view, and rested his chin on Bellamy’s shoulder to keep it hidden. The gesture was strange and foreign, but Murphy’s uncharacteristic shyness about sharing it told Bellamy more than enough. 

The human swallowed, lowering his hands to Murphy’s cool, bare sides, and leaned his head back to urge the siren to look at him. “Humans, they do this.”

Murphy’s eyelids fluttered as Bellamy pressed their mouths together, warmth blooming between and around their lips from the hot breath puffing through their noses. He did what he could with Murphy sitting still as a statue, his eyes open, crossed and watching him move his lips against Murphy’s own. Bellamy leaned forward and wrapped an arm around Murphy’s waist, pulling him closer in his lap until their chests were pressed flush together. When Bellamy pulled away from Murphy’s mouth for a breath, Murphy was panting, frankly over-exaggeratedly, and watching Bellamy with deep and wide eyes in the shadow his own near face cast upon Bellamy’s.

“I’m dying?” Murphy said, reaching up to touch the side of his neck for fluttering gills that were no longer there.

“You’re just short of breath,” Bellamy promised, shaking his head with a laugh. “You’re not dying. Just take in a few deep ones.” He took a deep breath in demonstration, and then rested his forehead against Murphy’s as he mimicked him.

Murphy breathed deeply for a few moments, and then slapped a hand over his heart. “It is fast, like when I fight. It is coming out.”

“It’s not coming out,” Bellamy said, exasperated and overjoyed. “You’re just excited. Happy.” He hoped. There was a very real chance that Murphy _was_ actually about to fight him for that particular stunt.

Murphy, as he'd hoped, nodded against his forehead. “Happy,” he breathed, and then took initiative and attacked Bellamy’s mouth with his own, kissing hard and, _ouch_ , kind of painfully. Bellamy guided it into something calmer and less… apex ocean predator trying his best, and then it was nice, lovely, even, the way their lips slid and melted together. Up until Murphy, eager and learning fast as usual, took it upon himself to try and jam his tongue into Bellamy’s mouth, who leaned back with a hand on Murphy’s naked chest.

“Woah there, Tiger Shark,” he laughed, feeling dizzy and a little helpless. “Take me to dinner first.”

Murphy wasn’t listening, panting heavily against Bellamy’s lips with blown eyes. “What humans call that,” he demanded breathlessly.

“A kiss,” Bellamy answered, pecking Murphy once on the lips, who chased Bellamy’s until he had to stop him with a few fingers over the siren’s mouth. “There’s… no time.”

They’d been out at sea for two hours, he couldn’t risk getting back after the others had already returned. If he went back now, maybe he could talk Octavia into keeping all this between them, get her to help him concoct a story for the missing specimen.

Bellamy evidently wasn’t a good enough kisser to convince Murphy to give up his life in the water, which was expected, and something Bellamy had come to delicate terms with. The boy ran his hands over Bellamy’s cheeks one last time as if memorizing his face, and then stood to shuck off what remained of his clothes.

It was like the world had stopped spinning just long enough to stare, as Murphy glanced one last time over his shoulder, standing at the edge of the boat. Noticing the yearning and yawning misery on Bellamy’s face, Murphy turned his back to the water, pinched his nose with a finger and a thumb, clearly mimicking some brave swimmers he must have seen during a warmer summer, and tipped himself backwards into the water. Bellamy’s laugh grew sadder as he watched the dark water splash and ripple and shift the boat away, imagining what gruesome things must have been happening to Murphy’s body just under the surface.

Bellamy sat with his eyes shut for some time, and eventually a quiet little splash drew them open again. He kneeled by the edge of the dingy, meeting Murphy there who propped himself up on the boat’s rim by his red-finned forearms and gave Bellamy a tired smile.

“You okay? No hurting?”

Murphy sighed. “No hurting. Not on the out.”

Bellamy understood. There was a lot aching on the in. It was bittersweet to know that Murphy, who must have been closely acquainted with loneliness as it was, felt the same.

“That thing with our faces,” Bellamy addressed. “Do you love me?”

Murphy appeared flustered, and then raised his eyebrows in a forced, sly expression. “Just for the summer.”

Bellamy snickered and shoved Murphy’s shoulder as he trilled, and Bellamy never thought he’d miss that weird sound. 

They gazed at each other in a pool of moonlight poured just for them, long enough for the lighthouse to sweep over Murphy’s glistening skin a few more times. “Bellamy,” he said, startlingly forceful in the fragile quiet of the night. “Kiss."

So Bellamy kissed him for the last time, and evidently, Murphy had decided that that was the perfect goodbye.

At the last flick of a crimson tail against stars, Bellamy began to row again, the boat much lighter and with a puddle of clothes at his feet.

Just for the summer. Maybe one day, those four words would be enough to allow Bellamy to let go of him.

 

〰〰

 

As it turned out, Octavia loved a fantastical, tragic romance just as much now as she had when they were young, and together they destroyed all evidence of Murphy’s existence before anyone coming back from town had thought to look for it. Clarke tried her hardest to write up at least a report of encountering the creature, but stopped midway with her fingers over the keys and realized what she was writing.

During the Expedition 100 team's summer studying king penguins at the research base on Arkadia Isle, a marine biologist died in a tragic accident and left his grieving friends and coworkers sharing the hallucination of a mermaid, found down by the rock pools under the cliff with a magnificent red tail.

Bellamy followed Octavia around the world as he always did, but in recent years had been known to venture off of the bases when he wasn’t working and explore the nearby towns, learn about their cultures and foods and languages, and bring interesting trinkets to his many homes to collect on his many desks, until he could hardly see their surfaces. He ate a lot of clams, and tried to be a good human, and often was caught staring over the sides of boats.

“What is it?” people would always ask.

“Nothing,” he would always answer. “Just thought I saw something.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> oh... hello... you survived!
> 
> please leave a kudos if you enjoyed this story, and a comment if the gracious reader can spare it for a hongry little beggar. fic writers are starving please feed us
> 
> took a short break from it to write this one, but if you enjoyed this fic i have a totally different and in no way similar murphamy story in the works right now called superstring. go check it out? :) 
> 
> okay, love u, enjoy pretending to be a mermaid in the pool this summer, i know i will
> 
> EDIT: this fic now has a BEAUTIFUL moodboard created by fellow murphamy writer CosmoKid that you can admire [here](https://cosmo-k-i-d.tumblr.com/post/186291764712/fish-boy-by-blueparacosm-bellamy-blake-is-bored)


End file.
